The Posed and the Transposed

This article draws on examples ranging from Richard F. Outcault's early twentieth-century newspaper strips to the more complex work of the German artist Wilhelm Schulz in a late nineteenth-century anarchist magazine to show how the format of sequential images can allow a play upon different levels of reality. Their simultaneous presentation, not time-bound like that of cinema, can subvert linear narrative progression and create a disturbing universe in which the boundaries between ontological levels become blurred. Schulz's image of a threatening sea monster encroaching upon the shore is compared to work by Expressionist, Symbolist and Surrealist artists in which the appearance of such creatures in liminal spaces evokes repressed psychic material, as waking life gives way to the irrational and the nightmarish.